While the show is, at times, uncomfortably earthy, Age of Resistance Tactics looks like Toys for Bob started crafting miniatures and dioramas immediately after finishing up the Spyro remasters. The graphics, smartly, don’t attempt to replicate the bruisy, oozy grandeur of the show, but instead opt for a toy-like cartoonishness. In fact, Bonus XP’s care for the property comes through pretty clearly once you actually start playing the thing. The problems with Age of Resistance Tactics indicate a lack of cash, not a lack of talent or imagination. I don’t fault the developers at BonusXP ( who also handled last year’s Stranger Things 3: The Game ). Remember that thing you saw in the show that was jaw-droppingly impressive? Here’s some art of that moment with PowerPoint text boxes of dialogue. It feels strange that a show as sumptuously realized as Dark Crystal would get a game so clearly compromised by budget. They don’t actually function as a means of storytelling they’re bereft of character development and loaded with Proper Nouns. ![]() A brief slideshow of concept art and unvoiced dialogue attempts to introduce the story and similar slideshows pop up occasionally throughout. The narrative presented here will be unintelligible for anyone who hasn’t watched the show, and maybe even to those who haven’t watched it recently. But, its approach to storytelling is similar. Mostly they just wanted to remind you of the thing you liked.Īge of Resistance Tactics is better than most of those games. But, they weren’t often interested in actually telling the story through an interactive medium. At best, they let you relive the greatest hits of the property in question. What I remember most about this era of licensed games - besides that they were almost always bad - was that their levels were tied together with the most tenuous strands of story. Remember when every intellectual property, no matter how seemingly insignificant or ill-fitting, got a video game tie-in? CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Open Season, Aquaman, Over the Hedge, the surfer Kelly Slater all of them got games in the early ‘00s. Even if you had never seen a Batman movie or read a Batman comic, Rocksteady was interested in bringing you along for the ride.Īge of Resistance Tactics, though, adopts the model that dominated the early ‘00s. Over the past decade-and-a-half, branded tie-ins like Peter Jackson’s King Kong, Rocksteady’s Arkham games, Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor, Marvel’s Spider-Man and many more have managed to capture the vibes of their source material, while still succeeding as games in their own right. Age of Resistance Tactics harkens back to an earlier era of licensed games in that it has no interest in explaining anything to anyone. Remember the baby Arathim that took control of hundreds of Gelfling, abducting them into the Ascendancy? They’re here, too.ĭidn’t understand any of that? Yeah, that’s the problem. ![]() Remember the Skeksis’ carriages, propelled by wheels made of giant carapacial insects? A tense early battle uses one as a backdrop. Remember the Gobbles, the hungry mushroom blanket that devoured a certain captain of the guard? They’re here. You’ll revisit a handful of locations seen in the show, and travel to new ones created for the game. With a troop of Muppet-y Gelflings by your side, you’ll battle through a version of the show’s storyline, but beefed up with a ton of extra fights, because there really are not that many fights in the show, I gotta tell ya. It’s not! It’s a solid, though unspectacular, turn-based strategy RPG. ![]() Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics - unlike the brilliant Netflix show it was made to market - is tough to recommend.
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